Teacher Confessions

I don't think the kids noticed. But then, they actually have
something to do during exams.

During the mind-numbing boredom of midterms, my support proctors and I played human Pac-Man around the exam room in slow motion.

When we are taking our post-lunch naps in the staffroom, we pretend to be asleep based on which kid wanders in for help.

Last week the projector screen came out of the wall and fell on my head. When my kids asked me the next day if my head felt better, I pretended I couldn’t remember it. I’m still blaming unanswered emails on that concussion.

You stay in there until you've learned perfect English grammar.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting a really big box and making kids who use incorrect articles before their nouns sit in it for all of class.

My deepest fear is accidentally using my teacher voice on other adults.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed by grading, I plan a peer-editing day.

In my first year teaching, I made kids who littered in the class stand at the front of the room and had the rest of the students throw wadded-up paper at them as punishment.

Teachers only care which kids are dating each other if it’s two of their best students. Then we fantasize about them teaming up to solve world hunger together.

Sometimes, in the middle of explaining something, I mime a huge yawn just to see which students are watching me closely enough to yawn as well.

I have to pretend to have respect for kids who cheat or kids who bully other kids. But I honestly think they’re jerks.

When I’m giving feedback on a particularly bad essay, I have to read it twice—once to comment on it, and once to make sure my feedback wasn’t too snarky.

In the morning, when I’m getting dressed, I think about whether I’m going to see any adults that day, and if the answer is no, I dress like the kids.

 

I bleed a little inside when I let the kids use my best stationery: my pretty pack of post-its or the good markers.

I get irrationally angry when kids don’t leave me enough space to write in the margins.

My favorite students are the kids who never follow the assignment instructions correctly, but turn in epic poems when they were supposed to write introductory paragraphs, or an analysis of justice and oppression in autobiographies instead of an outline of character development. The ones who interrupt class to question why we’re doing everything and whether education is all just an ideological brainwashing scheme. Them. Those guys.

I couldn’t actually care less about the numbers students get for grades. If it were up to me, they would always only get personal notes: “the variety of your sentence structure has really improved,” or “this is the best damned essay about narrative form that I have ever read,” or “you are a lazy bum. Get off Shmoop.”

Whenever a student contributes to a class discussion and I respond with, “thank you for sharing that thought,” I have no idea what you said—I was daydreaming about what my life would be like if I lived in Middle Earth.